Cities may not look like they once looked, but those of ancient times and today had a lot in common when it came to intangibles.

Despite notable differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements function in much the same way as modern cities, according to new findings by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder.

City planning says that as modern cities grow in population, so do their efficiencies and productivity. A city's population outpaces its development of urban infrastructure, for example, and its production of goods and services outpaces its population. What's more, these patterns exhibit mathematical regularity and predictability, a phenomenon called "urban scaling."

If you are a scholar and get on The Dr. Oz Show, you automatically become an expert in the minds of the public that watches The Dr. Oz Show - your peers might disagree.

And when it comes to education "experts", it is hard to know if they are just reciting talking points created by education union lobbyists or even if they have a credible background in education and education policy, a new study suggests. We see experts who misrepresent American student test scores every time international standardized tests are taken, and it ends up being no surprise that the solution they advocate involves giving more money to the machine they just said was letting kids down.

Researchers have quantified how the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to a warm period 8,000-5,000 years ago, when temperatures were 2-4 degrees C warmer than present and so could inform us what might happen if the same occurred now. 

Dr. Nicolaj Krog Larsen, Aarhus University in Denmark and Professor Kurt Kjær, Natural History Museum of Denmark, ventured off to Greenland to investigate how fast the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to past warming. Over six summers, they cored lakes in the ice-free land surrounding the ice sheet. The lakes act as a valuable archive as they store glacial meltwater sediments in periods where the ice is advanced. That way it is possible to study and precisely date periods in time when the ice was smaller than present.

Patients who have tried to commit suicide with medication are prescribed more medication after the attempt, not less, according to an analysis of patients who were admitted to three Norwegian hospitals after deliberate self-poisoning. 

The psychologists behind the work collected information about the patients' medication from The Norwegian prescription database in order to compare the medication load in the year before and after the poisoning episode and say they were surprised to discover that the patients' medication load, which was high in the first place, increased even more after their attempt to poison themselves. This was equally true for medication against both mental and somatic illness.

Norwegian women who choose to have children often say goodbye to their careers. Men, on the other hand, tarry on. Norway has, since the 1800s, come a long way towards a more egalitarian society, but when a child enters the relationship between a woman and a man the consequences for the woman are different to those for the man, according to the thesis of Eirin Pedersen at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at University of Oslo.

Less efficiency sounds bad, in the modern world of optimization, where everyone wants to sell you a 10-minute workout that maximizes your time.  But in the ancient world of evolution, you need to turn the tables.

Due to the boom-and-bust nature of existence prior to the last 50 years, we have evolved protection against starvation - our bodies adjust on the fly. That is why if you just go on a crash diet, you will lose some weight right away and then plateau and if you eat normally again, the weight comes back. Your body 'settles in for a long winter' and metabolic efficiency goes up.